Warren Ellis called it “just far enough ahead of the game to give you that authentic chill of the future, and close enough to home for us to know that he’s talking about where we live as well as where we’re going to live; a connected world full of disconnected people. One of whom is about to lobotomise himself through the nostril with a pencil. Funny as hell and sharp as steel.”

As with my other books, Audible refuses to carry this title because I won’t allow them to use DRM on it. You can get it at Downpour, where all audiobooks are DRM-free. I’d really appreciate it if you’d share this with your audiobook-loving friends and encourage them to vote with their wallets for businesses that let artists choose whether their works should be locked down with DRM.

]]>http://craphound.com/est/2015/02/04/drm-free-audiobook-of-eastern-standard-tribe/feed/2Populations by timezonehttp://craphound.com/est/2011/06/08/populations-by-timezone-2/
http://craphound.com/est/2011/06/08/populations-by-timezone-2/#commentsWed, 08 Jun 2011 19:31:02 +0000http://craphound.com/est/?p=1587more ]]>
Paul Clip was inspired by my novel Eastern Standard Tribe and made a set of analyses of world population by timezone.

I cheated a little by using a simplifying assumption: if a country has multiple time zones, I divide its population evenly between them. This inaccuracy doesn’t change the fact that our top three are…

UTC+8: China and others
UTC+5.5: India and others
UTC+1: Western Europe and a good chunk of Africa

According to Mathematica, there are 39 different time zones ranging from UTC-11.5 to UTC+14. I wonder if anyone has visited them all? Now that would be a glorious adventure! :-)

]]>http://craphound.com/est/2011/06/08/populations-by-timezone-2/feed/0UK editions of my novels; launch on July 20 with China Mievillehttp://craphound.com/est/2010/07/07/uk-editions-of-my-novels-launch-on-july-20-with-china-mieville-4/
http://craphound.com/est/2010/07/07/uk-editions-of-my-novels-launch-on-july-20-with-china-mieville-4/#commentsWed, 07 Jul 2010 09:43:07 +0000http://craphound.com/est/?p=1584more ]]>
HarperVoyager, my UK publisher, have just published British editions of the three novels they didn’t already have in print: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. There’s also a UK paperback edition of Makers out this week.

I’m going to be celebrating all these UK launches at Clerkenwell Tales in London on July 20, in an event with China Mieville, chaired by English PEN’s Robert Sharp. The event’s set for 7PM and space is limited (though attendance is free). Email Clerkenwell Tales to RSVP.

My second novel Eastern Standard Tribe has been published in German by Heyne, under the title Upload. As with the German edition of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (published as Download), they’ve released the German text under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Given that Heyne’s a division of the mega-publisher Bertelsmann, this is pretty cool news — especially considering that the CC release was their idea!

Update: There’s also an interview with me from the German netcase NetzPolitik: Link

]]>http://craphound.com/est/2008/03/03/eastern-standard-tribe-in-german-free-creative-commons-download-2/feed/0Scholarly take on Eastern Standard Tribehttp://craphound.com/est/2007/07/17/scholarly-take-on-eastern-standard-tribe-2/
http://craphound.com/est/2007/07/17/scholarly-take-on-eastern-standard-tribe-2/#commentsTue, 17 Jul 2007 15:01:13 +0000http://craphound.com/est/?p=1579more ]]>Dr. Graham J. Murphy, a prof in the Cultural Studies and Department of English at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, has written a swell academic paper about my novel Eastern Standard Tribe. The essay, “Somatic Networks and Molecular Hacking in Eastern Standard Tribe,” was originally published in Extrapolation Vol.48, Issue 1 (2007), from The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College. Graham and his publisher have given me permission to put a PDF of the article up, too!

Art’s Tribal activities as an agent-provocateur are obviously Doctorow’s
satirical critique of a wired marketplace that regularly has the end-user tied to the whims of a hostile corporate culture. Admittedly, Art is initially part of the end-user problem because his loyalty to the ESTribe requires his work at V/DT to be founded on maximizing end-user hostility. It is not until he is in the sanatorium that he has an epiphany that his life has been wasted. After roof-Art has been hurt while trying to escape off the roof, he is introduced to Dr. Szandor, a medical doctor who stands diametrically opposed to the sanatorium’s psychiatrists. Unlike the mental-health practitioners who have repeatedly ignored Art’s claims of wrongful incarceration and have opted to put him on medications that leave him in a drugged stupor, Dr. Szandor actually talks to Art and learns a great deal about the man. A key topic of discussion is the problems with mental-health facilities. During those discussions Art begins to sketch out potential alternatives to the sanatorium system that has him caged, a theoretical facility he dubs HumanCare. Dr. Szandor is noticeably impressed with Art’s acute vision of HumanCare while Art feels “a familiar swelling of pride. I like it when people understand how good I am at my job. Working at V/DT was hard on my ego: after all, my job there was to do a perfectly rotten job, to design the worst user experiences that plausibility would allow. God, did I really do that for two whole goddamned years?” (179). Art comes to recognize that the last two years of his life at V/DT have been a waste because his agent-provocateur mission, founded on end-user hostility and corporate stagnation, has stifled what amounts to his innate skills as a molecular hacker.

Podiobooks are free audiobooks that are delivered to your podcast player in installments. Instead of getting a full ten hours of audio in one go, the story is sent to you in manageable chunks, on the schedule you set.

The raw audio for this podiobook came from my podcast, but the Podiobooks people have taken my readings and cleaned them up, cut out the intros, and equalized the levels across all the installments. It sounds dynamite.

]]>http://craphound.com/est/2007/04/19/shitlist-comes-to-irc-inspired-by-eastern-standard-tribe-2/feed/0Eastern Standard Tribe podcasthttp://craphound.com/est/2007/01/11/eastern-standard-tribe-podcast-2/
http://craphound.com/est/2007/01/11/eastern-standard-tribe-podcast-2/#commentsThu, 11 Jan 2007 17:28:35 +0000http://craphound.com/est/?p=1576more ]]>Here’s the first installment of the podcast of my second novel Eastern Standard Tribe, a novel of political intrigue among high-tech, sleep-deprived management consultants. This is my most ambitious podcasting project to date — I figure it’ll take 4-6 months to complete.

I’ve found a half-brick that was being used to hold down the tar paper around an exhaust-chimney. I should’ve used that to hold the door open, but it’s way the hell the other side of the roof, and I’d been really pleased with my little pebbly doorstop. Besides, I’m starting to suspect that the doorjamb didn’t fail, that it was sabotaged by some malevolently playful goon from the sanatorium. An object lesson or something.

I heft the brick. I release the brick. It falls, and falls, and falls, and hits the little blue fartmobile square on the trunk, punching a hole through the cheap aluminum lid.

And the fartmobile explodes. First there is a geyser of blue flame as the tank’s puncture wound jets a stream of ignited assoline skyward, and then it blows back into the tank and boom, the fartmobile is in one billion shards, rising like a parachute in an updraft. I can feel the heat on my bare, sun-tender skin, even from this distance.

Explosions. Partial nudity. Somehow, though, I know that this isn’t the climax.

]]>http://craphound.com/est/2006/01/10/doonesbury-on-timezone-tribes/feed/0Roadcasting: Tech gimmick from EST coming truehttp://craphound.com/est/2005/06/02/roadcasting-tech-gimmick-from-est-coming-true-2/
http://craphound.com/est/2005/06/02/roadcasting-tech-gimmick-from-est-coming-true-2/#commentsThu, 02 Jun 2005 06:43:29 +0000http://craphound.com/est/?p=402more ]]>Many people have written to me with the news of Roadcasting, a technology that is very similar to the gimmick in Eastern Standard Tribe wherein cars stuck in traffic form ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks, sharing music among themselves (in truth, this idea came from my pal and former business partner, John Henson). It’s pretty cool to see stuff like this approaching reality, I tell you what.

It is a system, currently in prototype state, that allows anyone to have their own radio station, broadcasted among wirelessly capable devices, some in cars, in an ad-hoc wireless network. The system can become aware of individual preferences and is able to choose songs and podcasts that people want to hear, on their own devices and car stereos and in devices and car stereos around them.

Roadcasting provides a set of methods to transform radio into a community-driven interactive medium. Using collaborative filtering technologies, it enables rich passive and interactive experiences for ‘DJs’ and listeners in a way that has not previously been possible. Roadcasting matches you to radio stations that play the content that you want to hear.

]]>http://craphound.com/est/2005/06/02/roadcasting-tech-gimmick-from-est-coming-true-2/feed/0EST is finalist for Locus Awardhttp://craphound.com/est/2005/05/18/est-is-finalist-for-locus-award/
http://craphound.com/est/2005/05/18/est-is-finalist-for-locus-award/#commentsWed, 18 May 2005 01:58:23 +0000http://craphound.com/est/?p=378more ]]>Hee-YAW! My second novel Eastern Standard Tribe, is a finalist for this year’s Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Last year, my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

Locus Magazine is the leading trade mag for science fiction, and the Locus Poll — from which the Locus Award nominees and winners are drawn — is the field’s popular award with the widest participation (wider even than the Hugos).

The Locus Award winners will be announced this July 4th weekend, at Calgary’s Westercon. Here’s the whole list of this year’s nominees (shockingly good company to be in, by the way):

One of the coolest remixes that anyone’s done of my books has been the speed reader that Trevor Smith put together, which flashes the books one word at a time, at high speed, inside a Java applet. Though the words fly past so fast that they practically flicker, they are still readable — there’s some heretofore unsuspected talent buried in our brains for parsing sentences when rendered as rapid-fire flashcards.

]]>http://craphound.com/est/2005/04/06/mobile-speed-reader-edition/feed/0EST makes Locus recommended reading list!http://craphound.com/est/2005/01/29/est-makes-locus-recommended-reading-list/
http://craphound.com/est/2005/01/29/est-makes-locus-recommended-reading-list/#commentsSat, 29 Jan 2005 14:44:21 +0000http://craphound.com/est/?p=114Eastern Standard Tribe has made Locus Magazine’s recommended reading list for 2004, in such good company as Ian McDonald’s River of Gods and Bruce Sterling’s Zenith Angle. w00t!
]]>http://craphound.com/est/2005/01/29/est-makes-locus-recommended-reading-list/feed/1Boldtypehttp://craphound.com/est/2005/01/06/boldtype/
http://craphound.com/est/2005/01/06/boldtype/#commentsThu, 06 Jan 2005 18:02:47 +0000http://craphound.com/est/?p=113The future has caught up with the visions of the original cyberpunk writers — their virtual communities, online identities, encrypted data packets, communication gadgets, and rampant digital viruses are all here — and now the future’s uncharted territory is about intellectual property and copyright protection. Many of the original cyberpunk crew have retreated to the present and the past, while Cory Doctorow has stepped up to the future.

]]>http://craphound.com/est/2005/01/06/boldtype/feed/0Eastern Standard Tribe coming true?http://craphound.com/est/2004/10/13/eastern-standard-tribe-coming-true/
http://craphound.com/est/2004/10/13/eastern-standard-tribe-coming-true/#commentsWed, 13 Oct 2004 10:29:47 +0000http://craphound.com/est/?p=112more ]]>A group of “radio pirates” in the US are making part of Eastern Standard Tribe come true:

Lynch, 31, is one of a handful of iPod owners using the device to transmit FM radio stations from their car. He uses a bumper sticker on the back of his fender that reads “iPod @ 89.1 FM” to let passers-by know how to tune in…

“I put on some profanity. Comedy, R-rated comedy, Chris Rock’s early stuff. Then I called [his friend] up on his cell phone and he was two cars behind me. I said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but somebody up here is broadcasting swear words! Tune to 89.1FM.’ He turns to the station and he’s like, ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this!’ It was a big joke for a few minutes.”

Once a friend suggested using a bumper sticker to advertise the frequency on which he was transmitting, Lynch was off and running. He became his own mini-pirate radio station.

“For four car-lengths around me was this little bubble of Ã¢â‚¬â€? me! Whatever I wanted to listen to! So I could be listening to Chris Rock talking about dating and meeting women in a club and then the next song go straight to Neil Sadaka.”

The passage below is from Cory’s latest book, Eastern Standard Tribe. It’s a fun romp. In an early part of the book, the protagonist has a car accident, and he finds himself in need of a lawyer. So, where does he turn? The chat room for his Tribe. (You’ll have to read the book to understand the Tribal references). The exchange below highlights many of the issues under discussin by the Cyberspace Law Committee, and that’s why I’m including this passage here. As you’ll see, he not only finds a lawyer, and forms an attorney client relationship, but he also gets certification of the lawyer’s credentials, reviews his standard representation agreement in “smartcontract” form, and executes it. All without leaving the chat room.

For those of you not familiar with chat rooms, you may initially be confused by the syntax. It’s probably easiest to treat this as if it were a script. Each line starts with the “handle” of the person who’s talking in the Chat Room. “Trepan” is the client/protagonist. “Junta” is the lawyer. I’ve edited the passage somewhat to focus your attention on the cyberspace law issues.

]]>http://craphound.com/est/2004/08/11/american-bar-assocs-cyberspace-law-committee-cites-est/feed/2Vectorhttp://craphound.com/est/2004/08/04/vector/
http://craphound.com/est/2004/08/04/vector/#commentsWed, 04 Aug 2004 22:11:01 +0000http://craphound.com/est/?p=105I’ve found it kind of rare to stumble over a book that really speaks to me, that resonates, clicks in with a core aspect of my life. Eastern Standard Tribe is one of them.

]]>http://craphound.com/est/2004/08/04/vector/feed/0EST for 60% offhttp://craphound.com/est/2004/08/03/est-for-60-off/
http://craphound.com/est/2004/08/03/est-for-60-off/#commentsTue, 03 Aug 2004 16:28:18 +0000http://craphound.com/est/?p=104I’ve never seen Amazon do this before — they’ve got Eastern Standard Tribe on sale at a 60 percent discount — that’s $9.58 for the new hardcover! Hell, that’s less that I get ‘em for.
]]>http://craphound.com/est/2004/08/03/est-for-60-off/feed/1